Search Results for: Demick

December 30, 2009

Review: Nothing to Envy — Ordinary Lives in North Korea, by Barbara Demick

December 30, 2009:   I’ve been looking forward to this one. It arrived in the mail yesterday afternoon, and I’ll be nibbling away at this a few pages at a time during my commutes, posting short updates as I hit interesting passages (this way, I don’t labor under the guilt of having written nothing about it for weeks if work or family obligations prevent me from finishing it). Having flipped through a few pages, I see a work that sits...

Categories Books & Films/Media Criticism
October 5, 2009

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, by Barbara Demick

Barbara Demick, the L.A. Times’s excellent correspondent covering North Korea, has written a book about the people that most big media correspondents have dedicated their careers to ignoring. Yet every town in North Korea, no matter how small, has a movie theater, thanks to Kim Jong Il’s conviction that film is an indispensable tool for instilling loyalty in the masses. When Mi-ran was growing up, Hollywood films were banned from North Korea, as were virtually all other foreign films, with...

Categories Books & Films
September 23, 2019

How South Korea’s “human rights lawyer” president waged a quiet war to silence North Korea human rights activists

The Chosun Ilbo has published a Korean-language interview with Lee Young-hwan, the head of the Transitional Justice Working Group, one of the most respected human rights groups researching Kim Jong-un’s crimes against humanity. Although TJWG is based in Seoul and headed by a Korean, it’s really an international NGO with both Korean and foreign staff. Lee has been an activist for human rights in the North since the late 1990s, and received a Democracy Award from the National Endowment for...

Categories Activism/Censorship/Human Rights
February 14, 2018

The media fawning over North Korea’s Censor-in-Chief is indefensible, yet they still defend it.

A MEDIA CRITICISM OF DONALD TRUMP that weighs more heavily than their predictable policy and tribal differences with him is that his tepid repudiation of racists like David Duke and Richard Spencer “normalized” some of America’s most deplorable people. It’s going to be much harder for the Washington Post to make that charge stick after its reporters fawned over one of Earth’s most deplorable people — the Censor-in-Chief of a racist, homophobic, misogynistic regime that stands credibly accused by the...

Categories Censorship/Human Rights/Sports
April 26, 2017

How Moon Jae-in rode a wave of violent anti-Americanism from obscurity to power

Like Roh Moo-hyun, the President he served, Moon Jae-in’s ideological origins are found within the leftist lawyers’ group Minbyun (which has since become Pyongyang’s instrument for intimidating North Korean refugees in the South). As lawyers defending left-wing radicals and pro-democracy activists alike against the right-wing dictatorship, Moon and Roh became close friends and law partners in Pusan. Moon went on to become the legal advisor to the Pusan branch of the Korea Teachers’ and Educational Workers’ Union, a radicalized union...

Categories An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Korean Politics/U.S. & Korea
April 30, 2015

Why is North Korea still in the U.N.?

Oh, those wacky North Korean diplomats. If they aren’t shouting death threats in a U.S. congressional office building or making racial slurs against African diplomats, they’re smuggling dope, counterfeit money, or gold, or generally behaving like complete tools at U.N. hearings. You can accuse them of many things, but you can’t deny that they represent their government perfectly. Here is how they represented their government today: A U.S.-organized event on North Korea’s human rights briefly turned into chaos at the...

Categories "United" Nations/Human Rights
January 12, 2015

The Interview: A Review (Updated)

Does The Interview trivialize the suffering of North Koreans?  I’m not sure what you had a right to expect from the likes of Seth Rogen and James Franco, but I’d say it did so less than I expected. A central theme of the film’s climactic scene — Franco’s interview with Kim Jong Un — was hunger, and the contrast between Kim’s obscene wealth and the squalor of his people. Was The Interview a good parody of North Korea? It was a...

Categories Books & Films
November 14, 2014

Don Gregg: “I’ve long sensed that Kim Jong-un is going to change the nature of this country.”

“Kim Jong-un is a smart young man, and this was a very smart move,” Donald Gregg, who served terms as a C.I.A. station chief and the U.S. Ambassador in Seoul, said of the release of the detainees. “I’ve long sensed that Kim Jong-un is going to change the nature of this country.” Now retired, Gregg has worked in recent years to promote engagement between the United States and North Korea, including presiding over Ambassador Jang’s appearance at the Council on...

Categories Useful Idiocy
February 7, 2014

Open Sources, February 7, 2014

~ 1 ~ ROK, U.S. MILITARIES PREPARE “TAILORED” DETERRENCE: In 2010, North Korea attacked South Korea twice without eliciting any military response at all. If you ask me, that isn’t entirely a bad thing. Bombing a few shriveled conscripts wouldn’t perturb Kim Jong Un a whit. He might even spin that as a great military victory. We have other, non-military options (banking sanctions and subversive information operations) that would deter him much more. Unfortunately, but for understandable reasons, military planners...

Categories Anju Links
December 19, 2013

Open Sources, December 13, 2013

~  1  ~ LINK HAS RESCUED 204 NORTH KOREANS since 2010. Please support them if you can afford to. If you can’t — or even if you can — please go to this page and vote for LiNK’s “Project for Awesome” page. It helps to keep their fund-raising project where it gets more views. ~  2  ~ SHIN DONG HYOK TELLS DENNIS RODMAN how he can help the North Korean people, in case Rodman actually cares about that. But in a way,...

Categories Anju Links
December 17, 2013

Open Sources, Special Purge Edition

Today’s big news from North Korea is that Kim Jong Un didn’t kill his wife after all. Dark rumors had been swirling in the South Korean press — the kind of apocryphal rumor that’s more significant for the very fact of its circulation than anything else — that Kim Jong Un had purged Jang Song-Thaek over an affair with Ri “when she was a singer for the Unhasu Orchestra.” Ri has since appeared at a ceremony marking the second anniversary...

Categories Kim Jong Un/Kremlinology
December 11, 2013

Open Sources, December 11, 2013

~ 1 ~ THIS COULD BE BIG, even if the conclusion seems exaggerated: Yonhap reports that North Korea is dumping gold in China, and calls it a sign of “imminent economic collapse.” Yonhap says the last time that happened was when Kim Jong Il died, but to me, it’s reminiscent of North Korea’s behavior after the Banco Delta Asia action froze their money. I wonder if this is because the purge of Jang disrupted their financial network. If so, it...

Categories Anju Links
December 9, 2013

China not sounding so happy about N. Korean purge (Update: Park warns of “reign of terror,” unstable relations)

[If you haven’t read yesterday’s post on the purge in Pyongyang, start there.] China has summoned Kim Jong Un to Beijing “as soon as possible” to kowtow and offer tribute discuss what Yonhap describes as “the North’s long-term stability and bilateral relations.” China seems displeased with Jang’s ouster, and in case that message was too subtle, China also staged a 5,000-man night landing exercise on the Yellow Sea coast near North Korea (ht: Adam Cathcart). Kim Jong Un now faces a...

Categories Kim Jong Un/Kremlinology
February 18, 2013

Nuclear physics isn’t exactly brain surgery, … or rocket science, you know.

In the pages of the L.A. Times, Barbara Demick interviews Sig Hecker, who reassures us that North Korea is years away from having a nuclear weapon that it can deliver to its target.  As welcome as that reassurance would be if it were credible, Hecker is not exactly a rocket scientist. Sig Hecker is a nuclear scientist and a metallurgist, but he isn’t an oracle.  Hecker spent most of the decade leading up to 2010 explaining how far North Korea...

Categories Anju Links